PAINTing a Botnet IRC Channel

I suppose that even for a script kiddie it takes extra time and patience to come up with such a spoofed IRC channel getting crowded with infected hosts. Drawing courtesy of a script kiddie's wishful thinking. Here are some screenshots from the real world, and some of the most recent developments I covered in previous posts.

The Pseudo "Real Players"

What happened with the recent RealPlayer massive embedded malware attack? Two of the main hosts are now, and the third one ucmal.com/0.js is strangely loading an iframe to ISC's blog in between the following 61.188.39.218/pingback.txt which was returning the following message during the last couple of hours "You're welcome for being saved from near infection".

As I'm sure others too like to analyze post incident response behavior of the malicious parties, in respect to this particular attack, during the weekend they took advantage of what's now a patent of the Russian Business Network, namely to serve a fake 404 error message but continue the campaign. However, in RBN's case, only the indexes were serving the fake account suspended messages, but the campaign was still active on the rest of the internal pages. In the RealPlayer's campaign case, the 404 error messages themselves were embedded with the same IFRAMEs as well, in order to make it look like there's an error, at least in front of the eyes of the average Internet user.

Despite that the main campaign domains are blocked on a worldwide scale, the hundreds of thousands of sites that originally participated are still not clean and continue trying to load the now down domains. Moreover, the big picture has to do with a fourth domain as well, yl18.net/0.js, that used to be a part of the same type of massive malware embedded attack in November, 2007.

Why pseudo "real players" anyway? Because for this attack, they took advantage of what can be defined as a fad, namely the use seperate exploit as the cornerstone of the campaign, at least if its massive infection they wanted to achieve. The "real players" or script kiddies on the majority of occasions, serve exploits on a client-side matching basis, and therefore the more diverse the exploits set, the higher the probability a vulnerable application will be detected and exploited. Therefore, given the number of sites affected it could have been much worse than it is currently based on speculations of the success rate of the campaign in terms of infections, not the sites affected - a success by itself. Execution gone wrong given the foundation for the attack - until the next time.

Malware Serving Exploits Embedded Sites as Usual

The combination of the recent RealPlayer exploit and MDAC is a fad, but the very same is getting embraced in the short-term by malicious parties in China that have also started combining the Internet Explorer VML Download and Execute Exploit (MS07-004), thanks to recent localized forum postings on modifying the third exploit. Let's assess several sample domains.

8v8.biz/ms07004.htm (58.53.128.98) is such a domain that's serving a combination of these starting with Exploit-MS07-004 :

Result: 12/32 (37.5%)
File size: 3432 bytes
MD5: bafab9b8e38527e9830047fd66b39532
SHA1: b81abcf63a2c4bcf43526f28aec20fca2f58d67c

8v8.biz/1.htm - MDAC also loads 8v8.biz/06014.html in between 8v8.biz/r.htm - real player unobfuscated, wheere all of these attempt to load 8v8.biz/v.exe - Worm.Win32.AutoRun.bkx; Win32/Cekar!generic

Result: 27/31 (87.10%)
File size: 19501 bytes
MD5: 7b101f7baeae0ebab9ecc06fdb9542dc
SHA1: 36ffa50ce3873fb04c13c80421c205a7760f47ca

The binary is using a default set of known executables of anti malware products, and is installing a default debugger injected upon execution of any of these, and is therefore successfully killing many of the applications.

Another exploit serving domain with a very diverse set of exploits used, but again serving the faddish RealPlayer plus MDAC combination is uc147.com (218.107.216.85) :

uc147.com/test/MS07004.htm
uc147.com/test/PPs.htm
uc147.com/test/biaxing06014.Htm
uc147.com/test/index.htm
uc147.com/test/Click_here.html
uc147.com/test/PPLIVE.htm
uc147.com/test/Thunder.html
uc147.com/test/bf.htm
uc147.com/test/Open.htm
uc147.com/test/ms06014.htm
uc147.com/test/jetAudio%207.x.htm

where all are trying to load uc147.com/zy.exe :

Result: 24/32 (75%)
File size: 15456 bytes
MD5: 3a0804d8e12706e97cdda6aa4f50ef5f
SHA1: cfd2f158a658dc0d8618c35806b94008b4fb1c0f

The third domain is great example of what's an emerging trend rather than a fad, namely the use of comprehensive multiple IFRAMES loading campaigns. qx13.cn/3.htm (61.174.61.94) (IE COM CreateObject Code Execution (MS06-042) which loads sp.070808.net/23.htm, (75.126.3.218) where the following try to load as well :

sp.070808.net/in.htm
wc.070808.net/37.htm
az.sbb22.com/hh.htm
um.uuzzvv.com/uu.htm
fa.55189.net
acc.jqxx.org/40.htm
ktv.mm5208.com/25.htm

Two other IFRAMES within within qx13.cn/3.htm, w.aeaer.com/ae.htm (75.126.3.216) loads the same IFRAMES, and qi.ccbtv.net/btv.htm (66.90.79.138) again loads the same IFRAMEs. It gets even more complicated and the ecosystem more comprehensive as the secondary IFRAMEs logically load many others such as :

68yu.cn/s29.htm
ermei.loveyoushipin.com/pic/9041.htm
yun.yun878.com/web/6619038.htm
ppp.749571.com/ww/new82.htm
2.xks08.com/dm1.htm?60
ad.2365.us/110

The more complicated and dynamic these IFRAME-ing attacks get, the higher the campaign's lifecycle becomes, making it harder the determine where's the weakest link, and making it easier for the malicious parties to evaluate which node needs a boost by including new domains spread across different netblocks like this case.

The Invisible Blackhat SEO Campaign

Count this as a historical example of a blackhat SEO campaign, and despite that "Fresh Afield's" blog (blogs.mdc.mo.gov) is now clean, cached copies confirm the existence of hidden links that were embedded on each and every post on it, apparently due to a compromise. The blackhat SEO links invisible embedded within the blog's posts on the other hand point to a compromised account at the Texas A&M University (aero.tamu.edu/people/raktim), as you can see in the screenshot. Moreover, there's also a visible part of the campaign that was located under blogs.mdc.mo.gov/custom/?0f, and as usual, once the blackhat SEO pages were either uploaded or embedded like it happened in this case, the campaigns under the blogs.mdc.mo.gov URL were spammed across the Internet.

MySpace Phishers Now Targeting Facebook

The "campaigners" behind the MySpace phishing attack which I briefly assessed in previous posts seem to have started targeting Facebook as well. Ryan Singel comments, and quotes me in a related article :

"Hackers for the first time are targeting the popular social networking site Facebook with a phishing scam that harvests users' login details and passwords. Some Facebook users checking their accounts Wednesday found odd postings of messages on their "wall" from one of their friends, saying: "lol i can't believe these pics got posted.... it's going to be BADDDD when her boyfriend sees these," followed by what looks like a genuine Facebook link. But the link leads to a fake Facebook login page hosted on a Chinese .cn domain. The fake page actually logs the victims into Facebook, but also keeps a copy of their user names and passwords."

Compared to their previous MySpace phishing campaign that was also serving malware in between, this was was purely done for stealing accounting data of Facebook users only. And as we're on a Facebook malicious campaigns topic, impersonating Facebook's login or web presence from a blackhat SEO perspective to serve malware is always trendy. Take this fake facebook login subdomain serving malware for instance - facebook-login.vylo.org (209.160.73.132) redirects to iscoolmovies.com/movie/black/0/2/541/1/ which attempts to load 209.160.73.132/download/502/541/1/ where 209.160.73.132/dw.php is the adware in this case - Adware:Win32/SmitFraud. And yet another one - facebook-login-61248sf1.krantik.info (89.149.206.225) whose once deobfuscated javascript attempts to load topsearch10.com/search.php (209.8.25.156). Spammy, yammy.

Massive RealPlayer Exploit Embedded Attack

This malware embedded attack is massive and ugly, what's most disturbing about it is the number of sites affected, which speaks for coordination at least in respect to having established the infrastructure for serving the exploit before the vulnerability became public :

"One of our readers noted that there are a number of state government and educational sites that appear to have been compromised with the uc8010 domain. Upon review, I see that some of these have already been cleaned up. However, the .gov and .edu sites are only a few of the many many sites that are turned up via google searches for the uc8010 domain. As that domain was only registered as of Dec 28th, compromises of websites probably occurred in the past week."

According to SANS, there are only two domains involved in the attack uc8010.com/0.js and ucmal.com/0.js however, there's also a third one, namely rnmb.net/0.js. This attack is nothing else but "embedded malware as usual", javascript obfuscations, multiple IFRAME redirectors to and from internal pages, and scripts within the domains. Let's assess those that are still active :

- n.uc8010.com/0.js returns "ok ^_^" message and loads c.uc8010.com/ip/Cip.aspx (61.188.39.218) which says "Hello", furthermore, c.uc8010.com/0/w.js loads c.uc8010.com/1.htm; count38.51yes.com/click.aspx?id=389925362&logo=1 and s106.cnzz.com/stat.php?id=742266&web_id=742266

The internal structure is as follows :

c.uc8010.com/1.htm - attempts MDAC ActiveX code execution (CVE-2006-0003) in between the following

c.uc8010.com/046.htm - javascript obfuscation

c.uc8010.com/r.htm - real player exploit

c.uc8010.com/014.js - javascript obfuscation

c.uc8010.com/111.htm - unobfuscated real player exploit

- ucmal.com/0.js (122.224.146.246) - another obfuscation

- rnmb.net/0.js says "ok! ^_^ Don't hank me !" but compared to the first two that are still active, this one is down as of yesterday, despite that it still remains embedded on many sites

Detection rate for the unobfuscated exploit :

Result: 17/32 (53.13%) - Exploit-RealPlay; JS/RealPlay.B

File size: 3003 bytes

MD5: a85a28b686fc2deedb8d833feaacef16

SHA1: 0282e945ded85007b5f99ddee896ed5e31775715

Detection rate for the obfuscated exploit :

Result: 11/32 (34.38%) - JS/Agent.AMJ!exploit; Trojan-Downloader.JS.Agent.amj

File size: 2880 bytes

MD5: d363ffca061ebf564340c4ac899e3573

SHA1: 1226d3d9fcc5052a623b481b48443aeb246ab5db

A lot of university, and international government sites continue to be embedded with the script, and so is Computer Associates site according to this article :

"Part of security software vendor CA's Web site was hacked earlier this week and was redirecting visitors to a malicious Web site hosted in China. Although the problem now appears to have been corrected, cached versions of some pages in the press section of CA.com show that earlier this week the site had been redirecting visitors to the uc8010.com domain, which has been serving malicious software since late December, according to Marcus Sachs, director of the SANS Internet Storm Center."

Compared to each and every malware embedded attack that I assessed in 2007, including all of Storm Worm's campaigns, they were all relying on outdated vulnerabilities to achieve their success, but this one is taking advantage of the now old-fashioned window of opportunity courtesy of a malicious party enjoying the given the lack of a patch for the vulnerability. Why old-fashioned? Because malware exploitation kits like MPack, IcePack, WebAttacker, the Nuclear Malware Kit and Zunker, changed the threatscape by achieving a 100% success rate through first identifying the victim's browser, than serving the exact exploit. Another such one-vulnerability-serving malware embedded attack was the MDAC exploits farm spread across different networks I covered in a previous post. It's also interesting to note that a MDAC live exploit page was also found within what was originally thought to be a RealPlayer exploit serving campaign only. Shall we play the devil's advocate? The campaign would have been far more successful if a malware exploitation kit was used, as by using a single exploit only, the campaign's success entirely relies on the eventual presence of RealPlayer on the infected machine.